


Refuse

by Nary



Category: Three Fishers - Stan Rogers (Song)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Future, Canonical Character Death, Class Issues, Gen, Interviews, Journalism, Maritime Culture, Mention of Domestic Violence, Ocean, POV Outsider, Privilege, Widowed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-14
Updated: 2013-09-14
Packaged: 2017-12-26 12:44:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/966073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nary/pseuds/Nary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The woman stands on the artificial shore that glistens with shredded plastic and shards of glass that catch the light just so at sunset.  She might be old, Marissa thinks, or she might only be weathered by a cruel life.  A life that will be crueler now that the sea has stolen her husband - Marissa files that in her brainpad, in case she decides to use it in the voice-over narration.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Refuse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Katherine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katherine/gifts).



The woman stands on the artificial shore that glistens with shredded plastic and shards of glass that catch the light just so at sunset. She might be old, Marissa thinks, or she might only be weathered by a cruel life. A life that will be crueler now that the sea has stolen her husband - Marissa files that in her brainpad, in case she decides to use it in the voice-over narration. She focuses her eyecam more sharply on the woman's face - on Amihan's face, she reminds herself of the woman's name, skimming through her notes concerning the tragedy on her secondary viewer. 

"Tell me about your husband," she prompts. The background is too plain, she thinks with an eye to the composition of the shot - she had imagined the island made of garbage would have more... chunks, bigger pieces of recognizable debris, but she had learned that anything like that got snapped up quickly by the scavengers, leaving only the unusable refuse behind to compact and tangle itself together into something like a landmass. She pans back a little to at least take in more of the sea and the clouds.

Amihan looks at her as if she's gone mad. "What's to tell? Seventeen years we were married. He took his harvest from the sea, until she took him in return."

Marissa nods eagerly. It's good, almost poetic in its way - it'll play well to the viewers. "But your entire livelihood was based on his income as a scavenger - how will you survive now?"

To her surprise the old woman laughs, a short, bitter sound. "Oh, yes, none of the rest of us can shift for ourselves, it was all him keepin' us afloat while we sat home fretting and flailing each time he went out. It's one less mouth to feed - one big mouth less. No one to drink away the day's money and come home and get too free with his fists if he didn't like the way you looked at him. My oldest boy's taking on his rig, what's left of it, and I always brought in some from walking the shore, or from taking in laundry and sewing. So I imagine we'll make do, just as always." It wasn't the answer Marissa was hoping for. It won't bring in the viewers by tugging at their heartstrings. She'll edit it later.

***

"But why do you want to talk to me?" The girl is young, probably not more than sixteen, and her belly blooms huge and tight beneath her thread-thin dress. Her name is Ophelia, but she surely hasn't read Shakespeare to appreciate the irony. She might not be able to read at all.

"Because of your recent loss," Marissa explains patiently. "Your husband." So far all of the women she's spoken to seem astonished at the idea that anyone from the mainland would come here just to talk to them, just on account of something so commonplace as a storm that killed three men. It's a human interest story, that's how she pitched it to her superiors, and a humanitarian one as well. Maybe people will send donations. 

"He weren't my husband," she mutters. "Would have been, maybe one day, if the baby comes safe and whole." Birth defects were a common feature of life on this island of refuse - Marissa had already been shocked to see a child with arms that were shriveled and stunted. At home, they would have detected an abnormality like that long before birth, and performed any necessary procedures while the child was still in utero. Here, the only doctor can't possibly see everyone, and even if she could, she doesn't have the facilities to deal with issues that severe. Marissa had recorded some video of the child running, playing with two others and a stray dog, perhaps to use as linking footage between two interviews, with some suitably wistful music playing over it.

She draws her attention back to the girl at hand, who was picking at a sore on her arm and looking out the window, a large, scratched sheet of translucent blue plastic that gave an eerie cast to the room, made everyone in it look drowned and dead already. "I don't know what you want me to say," she was muttering.

"Do you miss him?" Marissa asks, trying to elicit some kind of emotion, anything at all apart from that resigned blank stare. As she speaks, she also makes sure to record the scent of the soup that's cooking on the stove - seaweed, brown and ragged, and some of the tiny red crabs that seem to be everywhere. For all they're surrounded by ocean, hardly anyone eats fish - there just aren't many left. She hopes she'll be able to edit out the other scents, the ones that might bother her audience more, the unwashed body-smell and the dank, salty air.

"I suppose," Ophelia says slowly. "He was a good dancer. Better at fucking though." She pats her swollen belly with an air of fond reminiscence. 

Well, Marissa thinks, stifling a sigh, at least she can probably use the first part of the quote.

***

Mayumi seems the most promising of the three - the most likely to give Marissa the sound bite she needs, the grieving widow with the handful of small children. She takes some video of the outside of the house - shack, really - before she goes up to introduce herself and make the always-futile effort to explain why she's there. None of these people have mind-threads, none of them can get the news directly - a few have cobbled together some kind of primitive freestanding computers from cast-off parts, but what kind of access can they even get out here? She just tells them she's a reporter and she wants to tell their stories to the rest of the world and leaves it at that.

The widow's broad face, which is marred by a cleft lip that would have been simple to mend back home, is damp with tears and reddened, chapped like her hands. At the mention of her husband she wails into the shoulders of other women, crowded into the house, women who look like her - sisters, maybe, or cousins. The two smallest children cling behind her skirts, wary as feral cats. Marissa records it all greedily, already mentally editing it into something that will break her audience's hearts. She can scent the possibility of awards for this piece - and really, it had better be worth something to have come all this way, to have to spend more than one night in this hell-hole. Three scavenger men drowned wouldn't normally even rate a mention on the news, but she can spin a story around it and make people care, at least for three minutes.

"You want to tell my story?" Mayumi says at last, her voice weary, raspy from her mourning, and yet full of skepticism. "No one wants to hear my story, not even me."

"People out there are interested," Marissa lies smoothly. They aren't yet, but she can make them be. "They want to understand more about your lives, your community..."

"Yeah? You tell this to the people 'out there'." Mayumi's face contorts as if a sudden storm is passing over it. "Tell them my husband died trying to scrounge a living from their trash. Tell them about his children asking when he's coming back, and me having to say he ain't. Tell them about his face when they dragged him up and laid him out on the shore, all grey and swollen so you could hardly tell it was him except by his clothes. You tell them that, and make them understand why he died. Explain it to my kids while you're at it. Explain it to me!"

Marissa steps back, recoils really, her high heel catching on some snag in the rubbish that passes for ground here. She falls, trying and failing to catch herself, hitting her head as she goes over. Even with the way her head is swimming, the twisted ankle that's already starting to swell, she frantically checks her footage to see if she got all of that. It'll be the climax of her piece - or it would, except that the recording is all scrambled. The jolt to the head, maybe, and the confusion... She runs it back, tries to reconstruct it from what's left, but it's hopeless. Gone. She pulls herself up (nobody reaches to help her). "Could I possibly get all that again?"

"Get out of here," Mayumi snarls, cold as a north wind. 

Marissa only notices once she's out of the hovel that someone - one of the grimy-faced children, most likely - stole her earpiece. Or maybe she lost it when she fell, but the effect is basically the same. A ruined recording, topped off by equipment loss she's going to have to explain to her producer when she gets home. Ungrateful animals, she thinks to herself, hobbling back to the jetty. The shuttle won't come until evening, but Marissa has every intention of being on it.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on Tumblr at [naryrising](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/naryrising) if you want to ask questions, make requests, or chat!


End file.
